We're all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I'm complicit in the things that I'm trying to oppose.
Interpretation
We often participate in the very issues we criticize, highlighting our own contradictions.
Wendell Berry's quote reflects the idea that individuals are often part of the systems and practices they seek to challenge. It acknowledges the complexity of social and environmental issues, asserting that even as we strive for change, we may unknowingly support the very structures we wish to dismantle. This self-awareness is crucial for meaningful action and recognizing our roles in societal situations.
In practice
During a lecture on environmental responsibility, this quote can provoke thought among students about their daily habits.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
You and your sins must separate, or you and your God will never come together.
War don't ennoble men, it turns 'em into dogs. It poisons the soul.
Being an Indian means living with the land. And the only way we'll be able to do that is to gain our freedom.
The masses do not see the Sirens. They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them... and royally squander their lives with her.
The law of violence is not a law, but a simple fact which can only be a law when it does not meet with protest and opposition. It is like the cold, darkness and weight, which people had to put up with until recently when warmth, illumination and leverage were discovered.
He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.
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